“A Delicate Balance is a three-act play by Edward Albee, written in 1965 and 1966. Premiered in 1966, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1967, the first of three he received for his work. The uneasy existence of upper-middle-class suburbanites Agnes and Tobias and their permanent houseguest, Agnes’ witty and alcoholic sister Claire, is disrupted by the sudden appearance of lifelong family friends Harry and Edna, fellow empty nesters with free-floating anxiety, who ask to stay with them to escape an unnamed terror. They soon are followed by Agnes and Tobias’s bitter 36-year-old daughter Julia, who returns home following the collapse of her fourth marriage. The original Broadway production, directed by Alan Schneider, opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on September 22, 1966, and closed on January 14, 1967, after 132 performances and 12 previews. … Act I: Agnes, an upper-class woman in her late…

“If Matrix Press can be considered Raworth’s incunabular period, the Renaissance flowering of his career as a printer began when he started collaborating with artist Barry Hall at Goliard Press in 1965. For those old enough to remember, the ‘Summer of Love’ was a transformative time. As a teenager in England I divided my non-school time between marching with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, rehearsing with my rock band, protesting the Vietnam War and attending poetry readings. They converged occasionally, as when there were benefit readings in support of striking coal miners or teachers — big rallies featuring poets (Tony Harrison, Tom Pickard, Brian Patten, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Barry MacSweeney, Adrian Mitchell, Bob Cobbing, Tony Jackson, et al.) instead of agit-prop rhetoricians. Swinging England was turned on to poetry, and these poets were working class. If they went to college it was art school. If they listened to music…

“Aragorn is a fictional character and a protagonist in J. R. R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn was a Ranger of the North, first introduced with the name Strider and later revealed to be the heir of Isildur, an ancient King of Arnor and Gondor. Aragorn was a confidant of the wizard Gandalf, and played a part in the quest to destroy the One Ring and defeat the Dark Lord Sauron. As a young man, Aragorn fell in love with the immortal elfArwen, as told in The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen. Arwen’s father, Elrond Half-elven, forbade them to marry unless Aragorn became King of both Arnor and Gondor. Aragorn led the Fellowship of the Ring following the loss of Gandalf in the Mines of Moria. When the Fellowship was broken, he tracked the hobbits Meriadoc…

“Umbra was a collective of young black writers based in Manhattan‘s Lower East Side that was founded in 1962. Umbra was one of the first post-civil rights Black literary groups to make an impact as radical in the sense of establishing their own voice distinct from, and sometimes at odds with, the prevailing white literary establishment. The attempt to merge a Black-oriented activist thrust with a primarily artistic orientation produced a classic split in Umbra between those who wanted to be activists and those who thought of themselves as primarily writers, though to some extent all members shared both views. Black writers have always had to face the issue of whether their work was primarily political or aesthetic. Moreover, Umbra itself had evolved out of similar circumstances: in 1960 a Black nationalist literary organization, On Guard for Freedom, had been founded on the Lower East Side…

“Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. For one job that fantasy can do is to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum and to distract us from terrors, real or anticipated—by an escape into exotic dangerous situations which have last-minute happy endings. But another one of the things that fantasy can do is to normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it. In the one case, fantasy beautifies the world. In the other, it neutralizes it. The fantasy to be discovered in science fiction films does both jobs. These films reflect world-wide anxieties, and they serve to allay them. They inculcate a strange apathy concerning the…

“.. Fire Music must be one of  Shepp’s most interesting albums, blistering and intense,  a half-way house between Free and the Avant Garde. The musical territory ranges from the haunting recitation and requiem for Malcolm X (quick history lesson here, it is not what you might assume), to the kitsch reworking of the  Girl From Ipanema, with Shepp as Webster/Hawkins reincarnated as Freddie Kreuger’s Nightmare on Elm Street, ripping into the tune at will while caressing it. Shepp found more ways to force sound from the tenor than probably any other player, punctuating expressive breathiness with shouts, shrieks and dissonaces, sometimes choosing its own direction own irrespective of ‘the tune’. The septet surrounds him in rich and varied textures, full of surprises, with moments of Mingus but burning bright, angry and on fire, as befits its title, Fire Music. Commentators often draw connections with this mid-’60s jazz and social/ political issues of…

Historian Heather Cox Richardson summarized Secretary of State Anthony Blinken‘s address to the U.N. Security Council Ministerial Meeting on Ukraine Sovereignty and Russian Accountability. We must never forget that Ukraine is a sovereign nation, and it is irrelevant that it belonged to Russia in the past or during the repressive era of the Soviet Union. Ukraine belongs to the people of Ukraine. I have highlighted sections of his speech that touched me. Open the link to read the footnotes.

She wrote:

“One year and one week ago—on February 17th, 2022—I warned this council that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the United Nations Security Council Ministerial Meeting on Ukraine Sovereignty and Russian Accountability today.

“I said that Russia would manufacture a pretext, and then use missiles, tanks, soldiers, cyber attacks to strike pre-identified targets, including Kyiv,” Blinken continued, “with the aim of toppling Ukraine’s…

No major media outlet did more to spread the lie that Trump won the 2020 election than FOX NEWS. It gave a platform to election deniers, including those who baselessly claimed that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the vote to favor Biden. Dominion is suing FOX and some of the leading exponents of this view. The case will be heard in April.

We now know, after publication of the depositions, that no one at FOX believed Trump’s lies. They agreed to spread them to protect their ratings. We will be watching to see if FOX is held accountable for allowing liars to undermine our democracy.

George Will wrote about the case. He does not defend FOX.

Five days after the 2020 presidential election, Sidney Powell, the fabulist lawyer, appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News show to say there has been “a massive and coordinated” effort to “delegitimize and destroy” Trump votes…

“Bowles holds a unique place in American literature. As an exile, he shared with 1920’s expatriate novelist Gertrude Stein, among others, a distanced perspective on his native culture. Through his translations, he earned an international reputation as an author with a North African sensibility. His fiction reflects a world akin to that written about by existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus, and indeed he has been described as America’s foremost existentialist writer, a label more likely to restrict him to a time period than to characterize his fiction accurately. Although his nihilism does strike one as a bit pretentious, it also has a modern application, reflecting as it does a dark vision of the world as contemporary as the times demand. Bowles became a guru of sorts to the Beat generation, although Bowles’s attraction for them was as much for his writings about drugs as for his generally pessimistic…

Guy Debord’s “Naked City”, map of Paris

“Psychogeography is the exploration of urban environments that emphasizes interpersonal connections to places and arbitrary routes. It was developed by members of the Letterist International and Situationist International, which were revolutionary groups influenced by Marxist and anarchist theory as well as the attitudes and methods of Dadaists and Surrealists. In 1955, Guy Debord defined psychogeography as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.’ One of the key tactics for exploring psychogeography is the loosely defined urban walking practice known as the dérive. As a practice and theory, psychogeography has influenced a broad set of cultural actors, including artists, activists and academics. … The Lettrists’ reimagining of the city has its precursors in aspects of Dadaism and Surrealism. The concept of the flâneur